


Hang You Up

by achillese



Series: All We Know [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Hipsters, Jocks, Language, M/M, Stereotype Reversal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-19
Updated: 2012-01-19
Packaged: 2017-10-29 19:35:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/323371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/achillese/pseuds/achillese
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam is the popular quarterback of the high school football team, paired up for a project with Dean Winchester and Michael Milton, the eccentric hipster-poet-vegetarian with a thing for organic clothing and free trade coffee.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hang You Up

“Milligan! Good hustle out there! Just watch out – that last move was tricky. Don’t wanna sprain anything before the game Saturday, all right?”

“Yeah, Coach.”

Adam jogged off the field, helmet in hand, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. No doubt his face was redder than usual, not just with the exhaustion of having yet another two and a half hour practice under his belt, but also with the biting cold November air. It was unusually more bitter than normal and so Adam found himself picking up the pace as he headed across the school’s back lawn and to the locker room ahead of the rest of his team. He was already running late for his group project meeting, thanks to the extra half hour Coach Zach had tacked on as punishment for last week’s loss against their rival team across the county.

Behind him, he could hear his friend Jimmy catching up with him, albeit running a little faster to stay even with Adam’s long strides. “Going somewhere in a hurry, I see,” he observed with a crooked grin.

Adam rolled his eyes. “I’m late for a group project, Novak. Not exactly something to be excited about.”

“Then why the rush?”

“Did the key word ‘late’ somehow slip past your ears undetected?”

“Owch.” Jimmy laughed. “No need to get cranky, man.”

Together they entered the locker room, already stripping of their practice uniforms. Adam opened his locker and finished undressing, skipping the usual after-practice shower in favor of actually making it to the meeting before his partners thought he’d abandoned them and decided to leave. Sure, he’d smell like sweat and football player body odor, but c'est la vie.

Across the aisle from him, Jimmy continued to talk. “...meeting with Anna Milton later to work on our own project.”

“For what class?” Adam asked, slipping his black shirt over his head.

“Environmental science. No idea what the hell we’re supposed to do. I didn’t read the instructions yet.”

“You’re a role model for all who follow in your footsteps.”

“Bite me.”

“You wish.”

Jimmy snickered and slung his towel over his shoulder. “No shower today?”

“Already late.” Adam slammed his locker shut and slipped his sneakers on. He grabbed his backpack and heaved it across his back as he took off at a fast-walk for the exit.

Jimmy yelled after him, “You smell like ass!”

Adam’s laughter carried back into the locker room only to be shut out as the door closed. He hurried his way down the hall past a row of freshmen lockers (conspiratorially bigger than the rest of the lockers. Adam sometimes wondered if that was on purpose, so the freshmen actually could fit inside) before reaching the stairs. He took them two at a time, his lungs still not having rested since practice began, and only rushed to the library so he could collapse in one of those big armchairs and take a damn breath.

He burst through the library doors and was immediately glared at by the middle-aged librarian, who looked up from her computer at her desk with her glasses hanging dangerously low on her nose. Adam nodded at her and flashed her a wide smile that only earned him an eye roll. Whatever. He’d take it.

He searched the room for his partners, Michael Milton and Dean Winchester, but could only spot Michael sitting by himself in a hideously blue and orange polka dotted armchair, his back facing Adam and his head bent forward. Adam quirked an eyebrow and walked over, trying to peer over Michael’s shoulder at what he was working on. It appeared to be a sketchbook, but before Adam could get a good look at it (though from the looks of it, it seemed to be an outline of a tree), Michael sensed his presence and shut it calmly as he turned in his seat.

“It’s about time,” Michael commented, green eyes rimmed with his thick black glasses.

“Where’s Winchester?” Adam asked, slinging his backpack onto the floor and plopping into the armchair across from Michael.

Michael brushed a wayward piece of black hair away from his forehead. “He was here ten minutes ago but left when he thought you’d decided not to show up. Where were you?”

“Coach kept us behind for practice.” Adam waved him off before leaning forward, elbows on his knees as he finally began to regain a regular breathing pattern. “So whatever. We’ll plan shit without Dean for now. This English project’s worth forty percent of our final grade for this semester, right?”

“Right. And you know how hard of a teacher Mrs. Harvelle is. So we’ll need to get together again – all three of us this time – and organize everything.”

Adam snorted in agreement. It was true, Ellen Harvelle was as strict as they came.

Michael set his sketchbook on the low table between them. “We’re supposed to be making a presentation on an author whose work we haven’t read this year. Brief summary of their life story, talk about the inspiration behind one of their works...” he trailed off as he reached into his brown messenger bag to pull out a notebook. “I started making a list of some notable authors we’ve skipped over.”

“Such as?”

Michael sighed as he flipped to the page in his notebook. “Nabokov, Ishiguro, Nietzsche, Wilde, Kesey, Ginsberg...”

Adam held up a hand. “Hold up. First of all, I don’t think half the kids in our class can pronounce half those names, let alone recognize who they are.”

Michael quirked an eyebrow. “Do _you?_ ”

Adam made a low noise in the back of his throat. “I’m a jock. I’m not an idiot.”

“Right. My apologies.” Was that a smirk? Asshole.

Adam ignored it. “Secondly, don’t you think that’s kind of...aiming a bit higher up in the educational system? We’re still on friggin’ Huckleberry Finn.”

“And you don’t think we should challenge our classmates?”

“Challenge them and they’ll start crying and calling for their mothers.”

Michael leaned back in his seat, studying Adam curiously. “You have a very low opinion of your classmates,” he observed.

Adam arched an eyebrow. “And?”

“And I think it’s interesting that you have a superiority complex.”

“Look who’s talking, Mr. Pretentious.” Adam was immediately on the defensive. “You with your free trade coffee and your organic clothing or whatever the fuck you called it the other day in class. What, you think you’re better than the rest of us just because you help save the rainforests by not using a certain grade of printer paper?”

Michael didn’t seem to be at all fazed by Adam’s outburst. If anything, the smirk on his face widened. “You get so angry so easily.”

Adam’s face burned. “Shut up.”

“I’m not saying it’s a bad thing,” Michael continued. “It’s annoyingly cute.”

“Dude.” Adam’s voice dropped in volume, eyes instinctively searching the immediate area even though they were alone, save for the librarian at her desk a few yards away. “Careful.”

Michael sighed. If there was one thing he hated more than anything else – more than the board of education’s refusal to provide more vegetarian-friendly lunch choices, for example – it was keeping his and Adam’s relationship a secret. Normally Michael wouldn’t give a damn, having spent much of his lifetime doing his own thing and flipping everyone else the finger, but Adam was insistent that they keep it under wraps for the sake of his reputation. A gay quarterback on the Lawrence High School football team didn’t exactly warrant a warm welcome from peers.

To be honest, Michael didn’t see the problem. Adam was well-liked by most of their soon-to-be-graduating class. He only acted like an ass to those closest to him because they knew he was kidding, but to everyone else he was actually pretty much a sweetheart. Nobody really had a problem with him, so “why,” Michael had asked oh so eloquently one day when he was particularly frustrated with all the secret-keeping, “should it fucking matter if you prefer cock? I’m sure they’d all still think the sun shines out of your ass.”

To which Adam had replied: “The sun can’t shine out of my ass if there’s a dick up there, you idiot.”

In short, putting on the front that they weren’t dating was actually easy, considering they lovingly insulted each other even in private. But even Michael was getting tired of the hiding.

“I don’t like being your dirty little secret,” Michael mumbled, glancing up at Adam through his dark lashes. “I know you don’t think it’s a big deal that I have to pretend ‘we’ aren’t a thing, but it is.”

“And you think it’s easy for _me?_ ” Adam asked. “Having to listen to the guys on the team make the kind of jokes they do about the other gay kids in our school? Like the shit they say about Cas?” He swallowed hard. “I have to listen to them call your brother a faggot and a princess and I can’t say anything to defend him.”

“And I’ve told you before, I’ll step in if you don’t want to get involved. Like you said the first time, it could...jeopardize your being in the closet.” _God_ how Michael hated that phrase. ‘In the closet.’ Who started that and why did it catch on?

Adam scoffed. “Except everything you do just screams passive-aggressive. You want me to get involved but you don’t wanna say so and cause an argument, so you’re gonna make little side comments about us being a secret until I say something, is that right?”

“How is it a side comment if I outright say ‘I don’t like being your dirty little secret’?” Michael asked. “Isn’t that just being honest and forward? Besides, _you’re_ the one sending passive-aggressive messages. You missed our date at the poetry slam last week, remember?”

“It’s not my fault Jimmy and the other guys from the team dropped by my house without telling me,” Adam said, his voice gaining volume and earning him another reproachful look from the librarian. “It’s not like I could’ve told them ‘Sorry, gotta meet my poet-slash-vegetarian boyfriend at the coffee house to bond over polysyllabic words and iambic pentameter.’”

“You could’ve, but they’d have needed a dictionary to decode half of what you said.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

Adam opened his mouth to reply but he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Jimmy and some of the other guys from the football team were standing outside the glass library doors motioning to Adam. He could read them clearly: ‘Ditch the weirdo and come hang with us.’

Michael saw where Adam was looking and sighed dejectedly. “Go with them. I know you’d rather be with them. We can work on this project later.” He shoved his notebook into his bag a little more violently than necessary and snatched up his sketchbook before turning sharply on his heel and heading for the doors.

When Adam grabbed his arm from behind and pulled him around, Michael expected a reproach or maybe a final defiant glare and defensive statement, not a full-on kiss. Not in front of Adam’s teammates, who stared at the two lip-locked boys like zoo exhibits. Michael froze with a hand keeping his messenger bag on his shoulder but Adam had his long fingers tangled in Michael’s hair, both hands holding him in place so he couldn’t move away even if he tried. Not that he wanted to. Sure, they’d kissed before, but never with this kind of desperate need tainting the act itself.

They only separated when the librarian coughed pointedly from her desk, and even then they ignored the shell-shocked looks on Adam’s teammates’ faces. He’d have a lot of explaining to do to Jimmy later, that was for damn sure. But for right now, only one thing mattered.

“Fuck being my dirty little secret,” Adam hissed, his face close enough where his lips brushed over Michael’s. “From now on, you’re just _mine._ ”


End file.
